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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

> According to AT&T, the iPhone you want to unlock can't be associated with a current active term commitment, and you must already be out of your contract terms (usually two years from purchase) or you must have paid an early termination fee. Your account must be in good standing, too—no $700 overdue phone bills for you.

I don't see anything that seems overly strict here. You finish the contract you signed up for, or pay the early termination fee and also make sure your bill is paid.

What is overly strict about this? This seems to be more common sense than anything.

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It's strict in comparison to other carriers. T-Mobile, for example, has long had a policy of unlocking phones after the first 90 days of the two year contract.

It's not exactly common sense either. If you unlock your phone, you could theoretically use it with another carrier, but you're still on the hook with AT&T for the full two year contract. Since they get there money from the contract regardless, why should the contract and unlocking have anything to do with one another?

Both the old policy and the new policy are bad for customers with (slightly) unusual use cases, like travelers.

When I had T-Mobile, I could buy cheap SIM cards in any country I went to, and put them in my Blackberry. I had all my contacts. I had one charger and one device. Now when I travel I have to buy a cheap feature phone for calls, but I also need to keep the iPhone around as a very expensive and conspicuous Rolodex. It's definitely a step backward in convenience.

This is not true at all. I was a loyal T-Mobile customer for almost 8 years, I upgraded my contract, signed another two year contract (at year 6 of being a customer) and 6 months in I asked if they could unlock my phone because I was traveling to Europe and they told me that they don't do that until your contract that is up, and even then it was limited to a small subset of phones.

I ended up selling my phone on eBay and purchasing an iPhone 3G from a friend which I unlocked by jail breaking it!

I don't dispute your experience; I can only speak from mine.

I had T-Mobile from around 2003 or 2004 to August 2010. Every time I got a new phone (always subsidized with a new contract) I called immediately to ask them to unlock it so I could travel more easily. Each time they told me I had to wait 90 days. So I'd wait 90 days, call back, and then they'd send me the unlock code. Never had a problem.

I don't see why they insist it is locked if you are already into a contract. What if I want to use my iphone overseas for a few months. I am still paying them what I owe them, there is no way I can get out of it.

"can't be associated with a current active term commitment"

That part is not clear to me. At first sight, it seems to mean that the phone to be unlocked can't be currently associated with a working AT&T account. Meaning, if I use it right now, they won't unlock it even after my two-year contract is up.

If that's what it means, it sucks for people who want to unlock to use it abroad.

"Active term commitment" = "contract with time on it"

If your contract is up, you're fine.

It isn't even a new policy. These are the same terms AT&T gave me when I needed an old Motorola RAZR phone unlocked in 2006.

However they didn't follow the policy for iPhones for a number of years.

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